In 2024, Flowa celebrated its 10th anniversary and began a new chapter in its journey.

We decided to focus on what truly matters: helping our partners tackle the most challenging problems and seize the biggest opportunities in software development. This meant concentrating on providing software development and software business services to our clients.

At the same time, we aim to help our clients harness the latest advancements: using AI and LLMs to support software development can increase capacity—but only when applied wisely. The same principle applies to modernizing AI tools and other technologies: good software engineering practices ensure a smooth transition to new systems, allowing benefits to be fully realized.

In 2019, as Flowa turned five, we saw the need to renew and refine our purpose. One key aspiration stood out in our discussions: a commitment to advancing ecological and social sustainability.

This decision led to several collaborations with partners who shared our mission. We worked with universities to prototype applications that could promote sustainability in the forestry and restaurant industries. We also partnered with startups to develop solutions for leveraging the latest renewable energy research and automating sustainability assessments in retail.

Our mission to promote sustainability remains a core part of Flowa’s identity.

Our most significant startup collaboration began in 2017, when we started developing the MVP version of the What Matters to Me application for Bestser Oy [link to post]. Since 2017, we’ve partnered closely with several other startups.

This marked the beginning of our work in sustainability, as the central idea behind What Matters to Me is to promote social responsibility.

On our journey toward practical agility, we realized early on that adopting agility requires a new kind of leadership. To support this, we began offering Management 3.0 training in 2015.

Around the same time, we started collaborating with Yle’s Agile Accelerator. We helped develop and run Product Owner training for over 900 Yle employees.

In collaboration with Yle’s HR department, we also tailored a new training program on agile and modern leadership, titled A New Work Culture. Through this program, we trained over 120 Yle employees in the principles of a modern work culture.

Participants from dozens of organizations have attended our modern leadership training programs.

One of Flowa’s key principles from the very beginning has been practical agility. Our approach to agility is grounded in the Agile Manifesto for Software Development. However, we have never committed to any specific framework or ideology. Instead, we adopt and apply principles and tools that we find useful and relevant for the situation at hand.

Early on, we realized that when helping our partners improve their software development processes, it wasn’t enough to focus solely on the operations of development teams. From the outset, we sought to assist both development teams and their organizations in collaborating more closely with stakeholders and maintaining a stronger connection with customers. During Flowa's early days, we referred to this approach as Beyond Agile. Although the name has evolved over time, the core principle remains a cornerstone of our philosophy.

In addition to enabling our coding change agents to bring Beyond Agile thinking to our partners, we also offered dedicated Beyond Agile training. Over the years, we have trained dozens of organizations to apply these principles in practice.

Flowa’s story began in 2013 when Juha and Antti once again found themselves exchanging thoughts about the software industry. This time, they agreed it was time to stop complaining and wondering about how software companies operated—and instead, to try doing things better themselves.

As a result, Antti and Juha began searching for a founding team to establish a new company. They were joined by Tero and Ari-Pekka, and with the right people onboard, they began shaping the vision for a company that would serve as a professional home base for its founders’ ambitions.

This led to Flowa’s first experiment in the summer of 2014. The experiment was set to run for six months: if they didn’t generate enough positive signals during that time, they would shut the project down.

The beginning was challenging, as is often the case with new ventures. But toward the very end of the six-month trial period, they achieved their first major success—securing larger contracts that made it possible for all the founders to fully commit to Flowa. Among these early projects, the most significant was leading the development of a logistics application for a large industrial company.

Acting fairly is deeply important to us—every day. Fairness toward society, our customers, and our experts. The foundation for this is the transparency of our operations.

We share all financial and business information openly with our experts and involve them in decision-making. Additionally, every one of our experts is a shareholder in Flowa, ensuring they benefit directly from our financial success. This also strengthens our shared commitment to customer satisfaction.

For our customers, our fairness is reflected in our transparency and our satisfaction guarantee during the initial stages of a new partnership. Toward society, our fairness is evident in our commitment to ethical conduct and our pride in being responsible taxpayers.

Promoting ecological and social sustainability through the development of digital solutions is a key part of Flowa's mission. We partner with organizations whose mission is to help us all respect the planet's boundaries—for example, by combating the climate crisis or reducing the risk of biodiversity loss. We also collaborate with partners working to advance social sustainability by strengthening the social foundations of our society. Such initiatives include promoting equality, education, and public health.

Beyond our core activities, we are committed to donating 10% of our annual profits to efforts that advance ecological and social sustainability.

For us, practicality means that real results and impact always outweigh theory and best practices. We work with a strong empirical approach, applying lessons and principles from a wide range of sources.

This also means we strive to connect strategic and high-level abstraction work with practical implementation. We never focus solely on developing processes and architectures at the modeling or guidance level; instead, we simultaneously apply and implement our plans in practice. This ensures that our work always delivers tangible impact on a practical level.

In our day-to-day work, we also embrace systems thinking, aiming to view and improve the bigger picture continuously.

In our work, we strive to continually discover new effective principles that we can apply across various contexts. At the same time, we aim to stay up to date with the latest trends in our field and the world at large. As our operating environment evolves, we continuously update the software development principles we use to better suit the present. We achieve all of this through bold yet safe experimentation.